Photograph a beast side on. Most readings come back inside a minute with an estimated live weight, a condition score, and what the market says it's worth. No crush. No load bars. No yarding the animal to find out.
A crush and a set of load bars runs into thousands of dollars, and it only tells you anything once the animal is standing in it. So the honest answer, most days, is that nobody weighs the beast at all. You look over the fence and you guess.
An eye that is ten per cent out on a 500 kg cow is fifty kilograms out. At the National Processor Cow liveweight rate quoted in August 2026, that was about $180 on a single animal, and the error falls on whoever trusted it. Across a run of them it stops being a rounding difference and starts being the margin.
CattleScale is not a replacement for a certified scale, and it does not pretend to be. It is the number you did not have before, at a price that makes it worth checking.
Square to the flank, whole body in frame. Bull, steer, cow, heifer or calf, it is the same one shot, and it is the only one the estimate cannot be made without. The front, the rear and the far side are optional, and the app rates your set Good, Better, Great or Best as you add them.
A farm gate, a fence post, a cattle crush rail, a person, or a 20 litre bucket. A photograph has no scale of its own, so the app wants one thing in frame whose real size it can trust. You pick from a list, so there is nothing to measure and nothing to type. Want to give it more to work with? Drag a line across something you have taped, or print the free ruler sheet and clip it to the rail, and the app has a real scale to measure against.
Breed, sex, age, condition score, muscle and frame, fat at the P8, structural notes and visible health observations, all free and straight away. The weight, the two measurements behind it and the dollar figure unlock for a dollar.
Your photographs go to Google's Gemini, a large model that can look at pictures and describe what it sees. If Gemini returns nothing usable, OpenAI reads them instead. It works out how the animal sits against the reference object you named, and from that infers the height at the shoulder, the body length and the heart girth, which is the chest measurement just behind the front legs.
Heart girth is the one that matters. The app then runs Schaeffer's formula, the tape measure method stockmen have used on farms for a century, which is accurate to within about six per cent when the girth and length come off an actual tape. The app applies the same arithmetic. It just gets the two measurements from pixels instead.
Every assessment is read three separate times and the middle answer is kept. One odd reading in three is normal for these models, and taking the median throws it out instead of believing it.
What the model sees is compared against what the girth formula predicts. When the two disagree, the app says so and widens the range rather than picking a favourite.
You get a band around the number, wider when the evidence is thinner, plus a rating of Low, Moderate or Good confidence that reflects how much the app actually had to work with.
Every reading lists what hurt it, in plain English: nothing of known size in frame, a poor angle, a photo that cuts off part of the animal. Told up front, not buried.
Built for a paddock, not a desk. Every control is sized for a thumb and every figure is readable at arm's length with the glare coming off the screen.
One free unlock on every install, weight and dollar figure included, so you see the whole thing work on your own cattle before you spend anything.
Print it at home, clip it to a rail or hold it flat at the shoulder, and the photo carries a known scale. The app finds it by itself; there is nothing to tick.
No signal in the back paddock? Shoot the animal with your camera and run the photos through the app when you are back in range. Saved photos read the same as fresh ones.
The weight is shown in both, with the heart girth and body length in centimetres so you can check the one that matters with a tape.
The dollar figure comes from MLA's daily indicators. The app shows which indicator it used and how old the figure is, and warns you when it is stale.
No account, no password, no email address. Apple takes the dollar, and the app keeps no record of who you are because it never asked.
Everything except the weight itself is free, every time, on every animal. If the app has the breed wrong or the condition score looks nothing like the beast in front of you, you will know that before you are asked for money.
A consumable, not a subscription. One purchase, one animal. Nothing renews, nothing expires into a plan, and there is nothing to cancel. Apple takes the payment; we never see your card. There is no account to create and no email address to hand over.
Read this before you buy
CattleScale produces an estimate from photographs. It is not certified for trade and it has no legal standing in any transaction. Nothing is measured. The app infers dimensions from pixels and applies published formulae to those inferences. It is an informed guess with its workings shown, and it should be treated as one.
Do not use it for:
The full detail is in section 4 of the Terms of Service.
Accurate enough to be useful, and never presented as more than that. Every reading comes with a range around the number, and a Low, Moderate or Good confidence rating that tells you how much the app had to work with. A side on shot with a gate in frame gets a tight band. A distant photo at a bad angle with nothing of known size in it gets a wide one, and the app says why.
We publish what we have measured. Our first test used the model we launched with: on 70 scale-weighed cattle photographed with nothing of known size in frame, the typical error was about 23 per cent, and the true weight fell inside the shown range about four times in ten. Production has since moved to a newer model. On the first ten of those same cattle it ran at a typical error of about 9 per cent, with the true weight inside the range seven times out of ten. Ten animals is too few to promise anything on, so we are re-running the full set and will put that figure here when it exists.
The formula itself is within about six per cent when fed a real tape, so the error is in reading the measurements off pixels, and that is what the ruler sheet and the known length are for. The honest position is that it will not match a set of load bars and is not trying to. The comparison worth making is against the guess you would otherwise have made over the fence.
Stand square to the animal's side with the whole body in frame, and hold the phone level with its chest: shooting down from above makes any animal read short. Then give the photo a scale. The easiest is to pick something already in frame from the list: a gate, a post, a crush rail, a person or a bucket. Better is to drag a line across something you have actually taped. Best is the printed ruler sheet, clipped to the rail or held flat at the shoulder, which the app detects on its own and measures against.
Add the front, rear and far side views if you can; chest width is squared in the weight formula, so a genuinely head on front photo pays off twice. Every reading also lists what hurt it, so if it says the animal was cut off or nothing of known size was in frame, that is what to fix on the next one.
Yes. Every install of the app gets one free unlock, and it includes everything the paid one does: the weight, the range, the measurements and the dollar figure. There is no card to enter and nothing to sign up for. After that it is A$1.00 an animal, paid through Apple.
They are sent over an encrypted connection to the AI provider that reads them, and deleted from our servers as soon as the assessment finishes. They are never written to our disk.
The part we do not control: the AI provider may hold API inputs for up to 30 days for its own abuse monitoring before deleting them. We cannot switch that off on your behalf, so we say so rather than claiming photos are "never stored". Full detail in the Privacy Policy.
No. There is no sign in of any kind. No name, no email address, no password. A purchase is proved by a signed token that says only "one assessment has been paid for". It carries no identity, and we could not connect it to you if we wanted to.
No. It is a consumable: one purchase unlocks one animal. Nothing renews, nothing expires into a plan, and there is nothing to cancel. If you weigh one beast a year, you pay for one beast a year.
From indicators published daily by Meat & Livestock Australia's National Livestock Reporting Service, which are the same figures your agent quotes. The app picks the indicator that matches the animal: National Processor Cow for a cow, National Feeder Steer for a calf or a young beast, and National Heavy Steer for everything else. It applies a dressing percentage where the indicator is quoted on carcase weight, and shows you which one it used and how old the figure is.
An indicator is a market average, not a bid. What an animal actually makes depends on the day, the buyers present and how it presents. We are not a stock agent and this is not financial advice.
You will usually see it coming, because the free half of the assessment arrives first. If the breed is wrong or the condition score looks nothing like the animal in front of you, that is your signal not to buy the weight. Retake the photo with something of known size in frame and try again.
Purchases are handled by Apple, and refunds go through Apple's own process. Nothing in that limits your rights under the Australian Consumer Law.
The app is on sale in 175 storefronts, and the weight estimate itself can be run anywhere, though the model reads the breeds it knows best.
The valuation is the part that is Australian. It is built on Meat & Livestock Australia indicators and quoted in Australian dollars, and there is currently no way to substitute your own local rate. Outside Australia, treat the weight and the condition read as the useful parts and ignore the dollar figure.
Yes. The photographs have to reach the model to be read, so the assessment needs a connection. If you are out of range, take the photos with your camera and run them through the app from your saved photos when you are back in signal. The app accepts saved photos as readily as fresh ones.
The whole read on the animal is free, and so is your first weight. After that you only pay when you want the number, and by then you have already seen enough to know whether it is worth having.
CattleScale